


Alive and Kicking and Screaming

by MuseofWriting



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Coping, Gen, but not enough to put in the tag, there's some background catradora and glimadora
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-16 00:24:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16943523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuseofWriting/pseuds/MuseofWriting
Summary: Not everyone copes with glitter and rainbows.





	Alive and Kicking and Screaming

**Author's Note:**

> Please enjoy this self-indulgent stress relief

            The nights were long and they were quiet once Glimmer and Bow stopped sleeping in her room on a regular basis. Sleepovers weren’t uncommon, still, but there was a lot of damage to clean up and undo in the wake of the Horde’s last attack. They worked themselves to the bone and chowed down hastily on whatever food the chefs could throw together - or, if they were too impatient, simply what they filched from the kitchen - and collapsed in bed and fell asleep and woke up sore in every muscle and did it all again. Maintaining alliances, strengthening their defenses, rebuilding towns, trying - and failing, and trying, and failing - to revive at least SOME of the forest that had provided their greatest defensive border. Half the time, even Adora didn’t think about it, simply crawled onto her bed and fell to snoring. It was only when she would wake up, shivering in the quiet of no breath, no heartbeat but her own, that she would suddenly feel small and alone, the castle far too cavernous, fit to swallow her whole and lose her in endless emptiness. Whether she could fall back asleep after that or not was anyone’s guess.

            Glimmer and Bow, tired as they were, weren’t blind to the fact that the circles under Adora’s eyes were getting darker and deeper than their own, or to the way her arm trembled as she lifted She-Ra’s sword. And they were sweet, and they were kind, and Glimmer utterly insisted on taking a spa day to help them all recover. She led them through steam baths and facials and foot massages, until every muscle in Adora’s body felt loose and warm. Glimmer took her by the hand and kneaded at the sword calluses and rubbed up to her elbow with oil and lotion and warm cloths, and Adora let herself flop forward and buried her face into Glimmer’s hair. She breathed in deep and struggled against an urge to pull Glimmer in all her sturdy warmth against her chest and hang on forever. Glimmer smiled and stroked her cheek, leaving an uneven streak of lotion along her face, but said nothing. She and Bow spent the night in Adora’s room, and Adora slept deeply for the first time in weeks.

            The next morning she woke up and went to a flooded village and waded through muck trying to help Perfuma as she redirected water back towards the stream. She shoved her hands into mud and weedy tangles, lifting up waterlogged tables and cabinets as her fingers turned wrinkly and the icy water sucked all of yesterday’s tenderness from her skin. She brushed off Glimmer’s concerned look as she trudged back to her room, filthy head to toe. She stood under the shower for almost half an hour, dirt sloughing off her like a second skin, but the heat couldn’t seem to reach her bones. She folded into a tight ball on her bed, hugging her knees up to her chest, buried her face into the pillow, and felt a burn of shame as she fantasized that there was a curled heap of warmth at the foot of her bed, snoring softly, no more than a whisper or a tap of her hand away.

            A month passed, and another, the Horde attacking and retreating, quick strikes to decimate morale and all their rebuilding efforts, always gone before She Ra could arrive to drive them back for real. Glimmer suggested another spa day, a picnic, she took Adora stargazing and told her about the constellations. They came back in one evening after a grueling six-hour meeting hashing out terms and conditions of their alliance with Frosta, and Bow taught her how to play charades. She and Bow fell over each other laughing at Glimmer’s attempt to play-act Swift Wind. The next day she raced to a town under attack by the Horde and found nothing but burned out houses and the twisted, charred skeletons of the people she wasn’t fast enough to save. The memory of laughter felt like a surreal, cruel joke. The only laughter she could imagine was the kind she heard from Shadow Weaver, mocking, derisive, laughter with no soul or heart, laughter meant to be cold and piercing and painful to those who heard it. She shriveled inside herself. She tried to imagine her skin as rock, as the bars of a cage, as a solid metal wall no one could have a hope to climb or slip through. No number of massages and soft touches from Glimmer helped. No matter how Bow tried to cheer her up, something about it felt unreal to her, her laughter echoing as hollow as the castle, distant and aching for life.

            Mermista sent a message via Sea Hawk that the Horde had been battering at the sea gate and done some damage to the surrounding rock. It would help if She-Ra was there while they made repairs to make sure the gate itself stayed intact, or whatever. Glimmer was three pages deep into itinerary planning before Adora managed to stop her — Glimmer had her own duties to perform for her kingdom, she could just go by herself. Glimmer sat back with a troubled look, trying to insist it was no issue, but Adora grabbed Sea Hawk’s elbow and dragged him out the door, halfway out the castle before he managed to point out she might want to grab a change of clothes on the way.

            She was quiet on the boat, riding out Sea Hawk’s endless tall tales and shanties with the occasional hum of acknowledgement. She lay on her back on tried to pick out the constellations that Glimmer had drawn against the night sky, but it all blended into a meaningless scattering of white lights. She sighed, and the building tension in her chest pushed her to her feet where she retied knots pointlessly, trying to move and sweat and focus, as if straining her body could kill the monster in her mind. She slammed a fist against the edge of the boat and felt something stab into the side of her hand, sharp and shooting. Soundlessly she lifted her hand and pulled the splinter from it, skin shifting and clinging to it until she got it out. She examined the trickle of blood with a strange sense of impassivity, any urgent messages of pain compartmentalized far away in her brain, untouchable.

            The sea gate was holding as well as could be hoped. She-Ra ended up being mostly moral support wearied soldiers and laborers of Salineas as they hastily repaired the surrounding walls, waiting until Mermista was pissed off enough with Sea Hawk to kick him out again. When not helping strengthen the defenses she kept to herself, exhausted and uncomfortable without Glimmer and Bow to give her a buffer in social situations. Mermista seemed indifferent, until the last night before Adora was set to depart, when she invited her to dinner “for diplomatic purposes I guess.”

            Dinner was served in a spectacular hall with a table that could comfortably seat at least two dozen, seashell encrusted arches illuminated by strange bioluminescent plants floating in suspended aquariums. Aside from the butler/guard who brought them their food, Adora and Mermista were the only people there.

            “I was going to invite Sea Hawk but then he started practicing a new sea shanty so I had to kick him out of the palace,” Mermista droned, poking at a piece of seaweed on her plate. “So it’s just us.”

            “You… really don’t seem to have a lot of people around here,” Adora said, shifting awkwardly, squinting in the strange blue light, trying to identify what was on her plate. Mermista shrugged.

            “After my dad left a lot of people started fleeing, and that was _before_ the sea gate started failing,” she said. “Guess they thought I wasn’t fit to rule a kingdom, or whatever, and that we were all gonna die. Which is I guess we still might.” Adora squirmed, desperately wishing she’d insisted Glimmer and Bow come with her after all.

            “How long have you been ruling Salineas all by yourself?” she asked. Mermista paused slightly, and then shrugged again.

            “Like three years. It’s no big deal.”

            “How do you do it, all by yourself?” Adora asked. Mermista paused for real this time, setting her fork down and looking up at Adora with narrowed eyes.

            “I’m handling it,” she said. Adora held her hands up in surrender and shook her head.

            “No I— I’ve only been She-Ra for a few months, and I feel like I’m _exhausted_ all the time. And I have Glimmer, and Bow, and you, and Perfuma, and even Spinerella and Netossa all supporting me, and I don’t even have a kingdom to run with all of the daily mundane stuff on top of dealing with the Horde. How do you not just… cave in?” Mermista looked at her for a moment, her generally apathetic expression impossible to read. She glanced down at Adora’s plate.

            “Have you eaten anything yet?” she asked.

            “I… had a bite,” Adora said, biting her lip. “I couldn’t quite—”

            “Good,” Mermista said, cutting her off. She stood up from the table and grabbed Adora’s arm. “Come with me.”

            She pulled Adora through the painfully silent halls of the palace, outside, and at first Adora thought they were headed for the gate, and she slowed her feet, dreading an imagined lecture on responsibility from _Mermista_ of all people, but instead they took a sudden sharp left turn and moved onto a narrow path she hadn’t even seen before. Mermista hiked up the rocky path with a level of determined intensity Adora had never seen from her before, leaving her practically panting as she scrambled after her.

            She heard the roaring before she saw what was causing it. The path had long since turned into unevenly hewn stairs by the time they rounded a sharp corner and Adora found herself instantly soaked in spray. A waterfall plunged through the air in front of her, white with roiling water and splitting against the rocky cliff face. She gaped for a moment, before she realized Mermista hadn’t stopped moving, tugging her towards an outcropping away from the waterfall, and Adora found herself abruptly inches from the edge of the cliff, staring down a dizzying height at the pool of water below, white and roiling at the end of the waterfall, growing calmer as it spread out towards sea. Adora inched back from the edge and looked at Mermista in confusion.

            “Jump,” she said.

            “Are you trying to kill me?” Adora asked flatly. For a moment, she almost thought Mermista smiled.

            “Just jump, trust me.”

            “From this high up?!” Mermista groaned.

            “Come on, Adora, I’m trying to do something nice for you. Look, just go feet first and keep your body rigid, you’ll be fine.” Everything she said was backed by the roar of the waterfall, water slamming downward with enough force to snap her in half. Adora inched another step backward.

            “No way,” she said. Mermista rolled her eyes.

            “Look, I’ll go first. Don’t make me have brought you all the way up here for nothing.” Mermista backed up a few steps, took a running start, and leapt off the side of the cliff, her toes pushing off the rock and transforming cleanly into a tail a moment later as she dove straight towards the water. Adora could have sworn she heard her let out a yell on her way down, but she had probably just heard the waterfall. Mermista hit the water with precision, barely sending up a splash even from their height. Adora edged back towards the cliff, looking down nervously, until she saw Mermista’s head pop back up a moment later, hair plastered to her skull. She gave Adora thumbs up.

            “Oh, what the hell,” Adora said. She took a step back, and another, and another, and then before she could change her mind she was sprinting, running for the edge of the cliff, and just as she realized what a terrible idea this was she was pushing off the edge. She was in the air, arms flailing, a scream ripping from her lungs as her heart tried to claw its way out of her throat, and she ran out of air and screamed again as she saw the water rushing towards her, and remembered to snap herself rigid just in time. She entered the water so fast she barely felt it happen, just knew that suddenly her skin was cold and there were bubbles _everywhere_ as she fought her way towards the surface, and broke up into the air gasping, blinking droplets out of her eyes. Her hair clung to her neck as she kicked her way over towards Mermista, floating effortlessly a few feet away.

            “Come over here,” Mermista said, pulling Adora back towards the cliff. Several large rocks, worn flat by tides and wind, were still warm with the day’s heat, and Adora lay back onto one of them gratefully, clothes clinging to her skin.

            “Thanks,” she panted. “That was… that was actually fun.” Mermista lay back on the rock beside her, the bottom of her tail still trailing in the water.

            “I came up here a lot after my dad left. There’s just something about jumping off a fifty-foot cliff that makes you feel better, I guess.”

            “Ha,” Adora gasped. “I thought I was going to die.” Mermista didn’t answer for a moment, eyes on the ghost of the moon appearing in the sky.

            “My dad used to tell me this story,” she said. “About a sea goddess. It was like, an old myth in Salineas I guess? There was a woman who lived at the bottom of the ocean, and one day a young boy sank down to her, drowning. She saved his life by giving him gills and a fish tail, and she raised him with her in the ocean. But when the boy grew up, he resented that she’d made him live at the bottom of the ocean, instead of taking him back to dry land. He demanded that she give him back his legs and his lungs, but she said she didn’t know how, and he killed her in rage. When he did that, the spell was broken, and he got his legs back, and he swam for the surface. But the old woman at the bottom of the sea, her blood flowed out into the water, and she _became_ the sea, and as the boy tried to swim up, he realized he couldn’t, because the sea had a hold on him, and she wouldn’t let him leave. She held him there until he drowned, the way he should have all those years ago.” Adora lifted her head slightly.

            “Was that story supposed to make me feel better?” she asked. Mermista rolled over onto her stomach, flicking away a pebble.

            “It was like, a lesson about how the sea always takes what it’s owed, or something? Like how if you sail out into a bad storm you are _going_ to die. I’m probably not telling it right. But I liked it as a kid. People were always trying to tell me stories with happy endings, when I could _see_ the world crumbling around us, even as a kid. It was hard to _miss_ the Horde attacking us every month or so with some new weapon. Stories like that didn’t try to tell you the power of good always wins, or whatever. Sometimes, things go wrong. Your dad leaves. A princess gets left behind in a rescue and incinerated by green goo. The person you love tries to kill you.” Adora turned her head, eyes on the cliff rising beside her. “So like all you can do is be alive while you are, and sometimes jumping off a cliff and screaming your lungs out helps you remember that you _didn’t_ die.” Adora’s eyes found meanings in the patterns of cracks and outcroppings of the cliff, drawing trees and swords and faces with her mind.

            “Catra and I used to tell each other stories,” she said quietly. “When we were both leaders in the Horde, we’d pull Shadow Weaver’s mask off her face and break it, and all her shadows would spill out until she was just an empty robe, and then we could do whatever we wanted. We’d talk about fighting princesses back to back, and we’d argue about who would have to carry the other one off the battlefield.” She sighed. “Half the time I still wake up and think she’s there.”

            “Yeah, that sucks,” Mermista said, and then said nothing else, and Adora was strangely grateful. There were a few minutes of silence between them, nothing but the booming of the waterfall behind them. Finally, Mermista’s tail split back into legs, and she sat up. “My butler’s probably wondering where I am, so I probably have to get back,” she groaned. “You ready?”

            Adora took a deep breath and sat up. “Yeah,” she said, taking Mermista’s offered hand to pull her to her feet. “I’m ready.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been cross-posted to my (very new) Dreamwidth account [here](https://museofwriting.dreamwidth.org/650.html). If you like my writing, please consider subscribing to my account there. I'm trying to diversify my fandom social media presence beyond tumblr, and Dreamwidth is looking like a good candidate for fic posting & meta.
> 
> Places you can find me are:  
> Tumblr: thatgirlonstage  
> Twitter: @MuseofWriting  
> Dreamwidth: museofwriting
> 
> Thank you for reading!! Comments make my day~


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